God Does Not Fit in a Bottle What Joshua Taught Me About God, Freedom, and Theological Certainty

The God Who Commands Joshua Is the God Who Says, “You Shall Not Murder”

I do not believe we are permitted to divide God against himself.

The God revealed at Sinai is not morally different from the God who commands Joshua.

The Sixth Commandment does not say that every taking of human life under every circumstance is murder. Scripture itself distinguishes murder from other cases involving lethal force, judgement, defence, and lawful authority. But the commandment establishes something fundamental: human life possesses a dignity that cannot be set aside according to appetite, hatred, convenience, vengeance, or tribal loyalty.

That conviction has shaped my approach to just-war reasoning.

Force must answer to justice.

Authority matters.

Intention matters.

The innocent matter.

Restraint matters.

And once the danger has passed, violence must stop.

Joshua therefore cannot be read as though God has suddenly abandoned his own moral character.

If God commands judgement, then that judgement must somehow remain consistent with the holiness, justice, wisdom, and righteousness that belong to God’s nature.

That does not remove every difficulty from the text.

It establishes the boundary within which I must wrestle with it.

God Already Knew Israel Would Fail

Another part of the problem became increasingly important to me.

God did not give Israel his commands in ignorance of what Israel would later do.

Israel’s failure could not surprise an omniscient God.

Scripture repeatedly records Israel’s incomplete obedience and eventual compromise. Judges begins almost immediately with the consequences of Israel failing to carry through what had been required of them. Israel lives alongside the very peoples and practices it had been warned against, adopts their idols, and repeatedly suffers the results.

More broadly, Scripture presents God as knowing Israel’s future rebellion even while he establishes covenant with them. In Deuteronomy 31, before Israel enters the land, God speaks of the people’s coming unfaithfulness.

Whatever else we say about those passages, one thing seems clear to me:

God did not discover Israel’s failure after it happened.

If God is omniscient, he already knew.

That created a significant question for me.

Why would God issue a command he already knew Israel would fail to carry out faithfully?

But perhaps that question contains a human assumption.

When I give someone an instruction, I may do so because I expect a particular outcome. I remember showing mechanics an easier way to fit a truck suspension spring into place. There was a method to it. Done properly, the spring could be fitted without turning the job into a wrestling match. I could explain the procedure, demonstrate it, and leave expecting that the next time the job came through, it would be done that way. Then I might come back later and find them doing it the hard way all over again.

At that point there were several possibilities.

Perhaps I had not explained the method as clearly as I thought. Perhaps they had not understood what I meant. Perhaps they understood perfectly well and simply chose to do it the way they were accustomed to doing it.

As a tradesman giving an instruction, my knowledge was limited. I could misjudge the person, the adequacy of my explanation, or the likely outcome.

God does not possess those limitations.

When God commanded Israel, he did not later return to the workshop of history and discover that they had misunderstood him, taken the difficult road, or failed to do what he had commanded. Their failure did not reveal a gap in God’s knowledge.

If God is omniscient, he knew perfectly what he commanded, knew perfectly those to whom he gave the command, and knew perfectly what they would do.

That does not make their disobedience his failure, nor does it make the command insincere.

It reminds me instead of the enormous difference between a human instructor, who may misunderstand or be misunderstood, and the God whose knowledge is complete.

The command reveals what ought to be done.

The failure belongs to the one who fails.

God’s foreknowledge does not excuse Israel’s disobedience, and it does not turn a righteous command into an unrighteous one.

That insight became important to me when thinking about Joshua.

Where Molina Entered the Conversation

It was at this point that I found Molina useful.

Luis de Molina attempted to hold together divine omniscience, providence, and meaningful human freedom through what came to be called middle knowledge.

In its developed form, Molinism distinguishes between God’s knowledge of everything possible, his knowledge of what free creatures would do in particular circumstances, and his knowledge of the world he freely chooses to create.

I could see immediately why that was attractive.

If God knew not only what Israel actually did, but also what human beings would freely do under circumstances that never finally occurred, then God’s judgement could never be accused of being based upon ignorance.

God would know every road.

Every choice.

Every possibility.

Every intention.

And every outcome.

That way of thinking helped me when I wrestled with Joshua.

It seemed to provide a possible way of understanding how God could issue a genuine command, know Israel would fail to obey it completely, and nevertheless remain faithful to his nature and sovereign purposes.

I still find that intuition valuable.

But I am now more cautious about what follows from it.

Molina Helped Me, but Molina Does Not Define God

I have jokingly described my position as “Molina without the Christmas decorations.”

I still understand what I mean by that.

I am sympathetic to Molina’s attempt to hold together truths that I do not want to tear apart simply because I find their relationship difficult.

God knows.

Human beings act.

Human beings remain responsible.

God governs providentially.

But the more I think about the matter, the more I realise that the whole philosophical structure of Molinism goes further than I need to go.

Natural knowledge.

Middle knowledge.

Free knowledge.

Counterfactuals of creaturely freedom.

Possible worlds.

Feasible worlds.

Logical priority within divine knowledge.

These concepts may be useful.

Some may even be correct.

But Scripture does not hand me a diagram of God’s mind marked with those categories.

There is an important difference between saying:

God knows what would happen under circumstances that never actually occur

and saying:

I therefore know precisely how that knowledge is logically structured within the eternal mind of God.

The first has clear biblical support in particular cases. Scripture itself gives us counterfactual statements. David is told what the men of Keilah would do if he remained there (1 Samuel 23:10–13). Jesus says that Tyre and Sidon would have repented had certain mighty works been performed there (Matthew 11:21).

The second statement involves philosophical inference.

That does not make it illegitimate.

It makes it an inference.

And an inference should not be preached with the same certainty as revelation.

The theological bottle can become very elaborate. We can polish it, label it carefully, and hang all the Christmas decorations we like around it.

It remains a bottle.

God does not become smaller simply because our explanation becomes more sophisticated.

An Older Christian Instinct

One thing that has encouraged me is discovering that Christians were holding together divine foreknowledge and meaningful human responsibility long before Molina.⁴

That does not make the early Fathers Molinists.

It would be historically careless to claim that.

But it does show that the problem is older than the later systems we often use to discuss it.

Justin Martyr argued in the second century that divine foreknowledge does not reduce human action to fatal necessity. Human beings remain morally accountable for what they do.⁵

Irenaeus similarly speaks of human beings as responsible agents while also saying that God foreknows all things.⁶

Neither gives us Molina’s machinery.

They simply refuse to solve the difficulty by diminishing either God’s knowledge or human responsibility.

That is significant.

Augustine: “We Embrace Both”

Augustine gives me perhaps the clearest statement of the instinct I am trying to preserve.

In The City of God, he considers the argument that divine foreknowledge and meaningful human willing cannot both be true.

His answer is:

“But we embrace both. We faithfully and sincerely confess both.”⁷

I find that enormously helpful.

Augustine does not mean that contradictions do not matter. Nor does he simply stop thinking. He develops his own considerable account of causation, willing, grace, and later predestination.

I do not pretend that my position is identical to Augustine’s.

What matters to me here is his refusal to destroy one truth in order to rescue another.

God knows.

The human being wills.

God’s knowledge does not make the human action cease to be the action of the human being.

We embrace both.

There are times when theology needs enough confidence to say that, and enough humility to recognise that confessing both does not mean we have comprehended everything that lies behind them.

John of Damascus: Knowing and Not Comprehending

John of Damascus brings several strands of this problem together.

He begins his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith by insisting that the divine nature is incomprehensible and warning Christians against prying into things God has not disclosed through the prophets and apostles.⁸

That does not stop him doing theology.

He reasons extensively.

He makes distinctions.

He develops doctrines.

But he recognises a boundary.

When he later speaks about providence, he acknowledges that God’s providential ways cannot finally be encompassed by the human mind.⁹ He also affirms God’s foreknowledge while refusing to make that knowledge simply identical with divine compulsion of human evil.¹⁰

Again, I do not adopt John as though he were giving me my own position centuries before I was born.

He gives me something more useful:

permission to reason carefully while admitting that reasoning does not amount to comprehension.

God can be truly known without being exhaustively known.

That distinction matters.

Spurgeon: Do Not Close One Eye

Charles Spurgeon gives me another helpful illustration.

Spurgeon was firmly Calvinistic. His understanding of sovereignty and grace is not identical to mine.

That is precisely why I find him useful here.

When confronted with biblical statements about divine action and human responsibility, Spurgeon once remarked that it was not his commission to “reconcile” his Master’s words. He would receive both because both were revealed.¹¹

Elsewhere he criticised Christians who effectively close one eye to one side of biblical teaching because the other side fits their preferred theological system more comfortably.¹²

That strikes me as wise.

If my Calvinism requires me to close one eye, something has gone wrong.

If my Arminianism requires me to close one eye, something has gone wrong.

If my Molinism requires me to close one eye, something has gone wrong.

And if my own attempt to remain comfortable with mystery requires me to close one eye to something Scripture plainly teaches, then something has gone wrong with me.

The issue is not whether we have theological systems.

We cannot think without making distinctions.

The issue is whether the system remains a servant.

The bottle appears when the system begins telling Scripture what it is permitted to say.

Jonathan Edwards: Think Hard, but Watch the Thinker

Jonathan Edwards’ understanding of divine sovereignty and the human will differs considerably from my own instincts.

I would therefore misuse him if I tried to make him support my understanding of human freedom.

But Edwards has something important to contribute to this discussion.

In his Resolutions, he determines that whenever he encounters a theological problem that can be investigated, he should apply himself to solving it.¹³

I appreciate that.

Hard questions deserve hard thinking.

Mystery must not become an excuse for intellectual laziness.

But Edwards’ next resolution is just as important. If he finds that the pleasure he is taking in such reasoning is feeding pride or vanity, he resolves to put it aside.

That is a good warning for theologians.

There is a person holding the theological spanner.

That person brings pride, loyalty, insecurity, ambition, fear, tradition, and sometimes the desire to win an argument.

Thinking about God is not morally neutral simply because the propositions are sophisticated.

We should think hard.

But we should also remember who is doing the thinking.

Hilary: When Our Words Run Out Before God Does

Hilary of Poitiers gives perhaps the best sentence for the boundary I am trying to describe:

“Words will fail you, but His being will not be circumscribed.”¹⁴

That is an important correction to the way we sometimes approach difficult theology.

When my explanation fails, God has not failed.

When I cannot reconcile every detail of providence and freedom, God has not become incoherent.

When my system reaches its edge, I have not reached the edge of God.

Hilary was no enemy of careful theology. He reasoned deeply about the nature of God and the Trinity.

But he understood that the finite mind does not become infinite merely because it learns technical vocabulary.

That should temper all of us.

Mystery Is Not Contradiction

At this point an important distinction must be made.

I am not arguing that whenever theology becomes difficult we should say, “It is a mystery”, and stop thinking.

That can become another form of intellectual laziness.

A contradiction remains a contradiction.

Bad reasoning remains bad reasoning.

An interpretation should be tested against Scripture.

Historical claims should be tested against evidence.

Theological assertions should be examined carefully.

But there is a difference between contradiction and incomprehension.

I may know that something is true without comprehending exhaustively how it is true.

Christian theology already lives within that distinction.

We confess one God in three persons without pretending that we have mastered the inner being of the Trinity.

We confess that Jesus Christ is truly divine and truly human without pretending that Chalcedon gave us a mechanical diagram of the incarnation.

Likewise, I can confess:

God knows all things.

God governs providentially.

Human beings act meaningfully.

Human beings are morally responsible.

My inability to trace every connection between those truths does not automatically make them contradictory.

There may be a perfectly coherent explanation.

God certainly knows it.

I may not.

Returning to Joshua

This brings me back to where the road began.

Joshua.

The moral problem remains difficult.

The command to judge Canaan cannot simply be turned into a timeless licence for religious violence. Israel did not possess an open-ended authority to kill whoever it regarded as wicked. The commands belong within a particular covenantal and historical setting, and they must be read alongside the whole biblical witness concerning justice, mercy, lawful authority, human dignity, and restraint.

The Sixth Commandment remains before me:

“You shall not murder.”

I therefore refuse to read Joshua casually.

But I also refuse to solve the problem by assuming that God must have acted unjustly simply because I cannot reconstruct every reason available to him.

If God is omniscient, then his knowledge of those whom he judged was perfect.

He did not judge on incomplete evidence.

He did not misread motive.

He did not accidentally overlook information that would have altered his decision.

He was not surprised by Israel’s later failure.

And Israel’s failure did not change God’s character.

That was one of the insights that first drew me towards Molina.

But today I would state it more carefully.

I do not know every unrealised possibility known to God concerning every Canaanite person, household, city, and generation.

I do not know what every person would have done under every alternative circumstance.

I do not know the complete internal relationship between God’s eternal knowledge, his providential purposes, his commands, and human choices.

And I should not invent those answers merely because they would make Joshua easier for me.

God’s righteousness does not depend upon my ability to reconstruct the contents of his mind.

God is righteous because righteousness belongs to his nature.

That is firmer ground.

God Was Faithful Even When Israel Was Not

One part of Joshua and the history that follows must not be lost in the discussion.

Israel failed.

They compromised.

They disobeyed.

They tolerated what they had been commanded to remove.

They adopted the worship and practices of neighbouring peoples.

Eventually, the people who had once been instruments of judgement themselves came under judgement.

That matters enormously.

The conquest narrative cannot honestly be reduced to:

Israel good, Canaanites bad.

Israel’s election never gave Israel immunity from God’s moral judgement.

The same God who judged Canaan judged Israel.

The prophets make that unmistakable.

That tells me something important about God’s character.

God is not tribal.

He does not call evil good because his chosen people commit it.

God’s faithfulness is always consistent with his own holy nature.

Israel may fail.

God remains God.

Israel may compromise his commands.

God does not compromise his righteousness.

Israel may misuse power.

God does not change the moral character of justice merely to protect Israel’s reputation.

That principle belongs at the heart of my just-war reflections.

No nation possesses righteousness merely because it believes God is on its side.

No army becomes just merely because it calls its cause holy.

No government gains moral immunity because it claims lawful authority.

Justice remains answerable to the character of God.

The Sixth Commandment remains the plumb line.

The Real Danger of the Bottle

I have previously spoken of Calvinism, Arminianism, and Molinism as though they can put God into conceptual bottles.

I would now state that more carefully.

The systems themselves are not automatically the problem.

Calvinists have wrestled seriously with God’s sovereignty and grace.

Arminians have wrestled seriously with responsibility, grace, and human response.

Molinists have wrestled seriously with omniscience, providence, and creaturely freedom.

Thomists have wrestled seriously with eternity, causation, and divine simplicity.

All can teach us something.

The bottle appears when our confidence in any system outruns the revelation it was built to explain.

We say:

God must know in precisely this sequence.

Providence must work according to this mechanism.

Freedom must possess this metaphysical structure.

Grace must act only in the way our tradition has defined.

Judgement must be explained according to our preferred philosophy.

Then we defend the system as though defending the system were defending God.

That is the danger.

And I am not exempt.

“Molina without the Christmas decorations” can become another bottle if I am not careful.

Removing the decorations does not make my own explanation infinite.

No number of Christmas decorations can make a theological bottle large enough to contain God.

Nor does stripping the decorations off solve the problem.

The answer is not to find the perfect bottle.

The answer is to remember what the bottle is.

It is a human model.

Useful perhaps.

Necessary sometimes.

But always finite.

What I Think I Can Say

After travelling this road, I am comfortable saying some things firmly.

God is omniscient.

Nothing surprises him.

God is righteous.

God is sovereign.

God acts faithfully according to his nature.

Human beings are morally responsible.

Israel was responsible for its obedience and disobedience.

God’s knowledge of Israel’s failure did not remove Israel’s responsibility for that failure, nor did it make his command insincere.

The God who commands Joshua is not morally different from the God who says, “You shall not murder.”

Therefore the commands to Joshua must be understood within the righteousness of God, not as an exception which permits us to imagine God temporarily abandoning his own character.

Beyond that, I can reason.

I can explore possibilities.

Molina may help me.

Augustine may help me.

John of Damascus may help me.

Edwards may sharpen a question.

Spurgeon may remind me not to close one eye.

But none of them possesses the right to replace revelation.

Neither do I.

Conclusion

The road that brought me here began with a difficult question.

How could the God who says “You shall not murder” command Joshua to execute judgement in Canaan?

Then came another question.

If God is omniscient, did he not already know that Israel would fail to carry out his commands faithfully?

I believe he did.

Their failure did not surprise him.

Nor did it make his command unrighteous.

God remained faithful to his nature even when Israel was not.

That reflection eventually introduced me to Molina. Middle knowledge gave me one possible way of thinking about divine omniscience and meaningful human choice.

I remain grateful for that.

But Molina is not the foundation.

Scripture is.

And I have become increasingly convinced that the safest theological posture is not to stop thinking, but to know the difference between what God has revealed and what I have inferred.

Augustine says:

“We embrace both.”

Spurgeon reminds me not to close one eye merely because two revealed truths are difficult to bring together.

Edwards reminds me to investigate the theological problem while watching for pride in the theologian.

Hilary reminds me that when words fail, God’s being has not failed.

And John of Damascus reminds me that serious theology and acknowledged mystery can live together.

So I will continue to wrestle with Joshua.

I will continue to use the Sixth Commandment as a moral plumb line.

I will continue to ask hard questions about judgement, warfare, sovereignty, freedom, and responsibility.

I will listen to Molina, Calvin, Arminius, Augustine, Aquinas, Edwards, Spurgeon, and the Fathers.

But I will try not to confuse any of their maps, or mine, with the country.

God has revealed enough for me to know him truly.

He has not made himself available for dismantling on my workbench.

The bottle may be beautifully made.

It may carry an impressive theological label.

We may hang every Christmas decoration we possess around it.

It remains a bottle.

God does not fit inside it.

He never did.